In the fight to preserve the toughest abortion ban in the nation, the talk is not of a fetus' right to life. It's of a woman's right to motherhood. Antiabortion activists here deliberately avoid the familiar slogans of their movement. They don't talk about the "murder of innocent babies" or quote the Bible on the sanctity of life.

The government agreed to a compromise with hard-line Islamic lawmakers on proposed changes to a law that has long made punishing rapists almost impossible, a legislator said. The widely criticized law, based on Islamic tenets, requires a woman who claims to have been raped to produce four witnesses. A ruling-party lawmaker said the government had agreed to a compromise by letting victims choose between prosecuting under the four-witness rule or under Pakistan's civil penal code.

When a self-taught lawyer and activist named Chen Guangcheng went public with reports of forced abortions and other abuses by family-planning officials in China's Shandong province, he became a local hero. He also became a state threat. Roughly a year later, despite international pressure, widespread support from lawyers and an acknowledgment from national officials that many of his disclosures were accurate, the 35-year-old Chen remains in custody.

Police with batons and shields beat women's rights demonstrators in a downtown Tehran square, injuring one protester and detaining 20. The protest by about 200 women was organized by a previously unknown group calling itself the Labor and Communist Party. "We are women, we are human, but we don't have any rights!" protesters chanted. About 100 police, including female officers, attacked the demonstrators and dispersed them about an hour after the protest began.

Iran is one of the world's worst offenders in allowing women to be sold into the sex trade, the United States said in an annual report on human trafficking worldwide. The State Department downgraded Iran into its worst category, which includes 12 nations assessed to have done little to stop the trade, which involves as many as 800,000 victims. The report cites a 16-year-old trafficking victim who was publicly hanged in Iran for having sex outside of marriage.

A Christian group decrying Islam as oppressive to women drew scores of supporters to Riverside Community College on Thursday, along with dozens of boisterous Muslim student counterprotesters. The tense, 90-minute gathering began as a lecture and degenerated into heated arguments and one-on-one theological debates, with campus police eventually stepping in to disperse the crowd.

A court convicted a young Turkish man of murdering his sister in what prosecutors described as an "honor killing" meant to punish the woman for her Western lifestyle. Ayhan Surucu, who was 18 at the time of the February 2005 fatal shooting of his sister, Hatun, was sentenced as a juvenile to nine years and three months in prison. The court acquitted his two older brothers. Hatun Surucu, a 23-year-old divorced mother, was killed by three shots to her head on a Berlin street.

Re "Women and 'gendercide,' " Opinion, March 26 This reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention!" We need more activists like Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lives with 24-hour protection because of death threats yet decides not to be silent on this important issue. If she can find the courage to stand for those who can't stand for themselves, we in our comfortable communities should be able to move mountains. Women's rights are perceived as something special that are given to women rather than basic human rights.

Thousands of Pakistani women took to the streets Wednesday for International Women's Day to press for freedom, equal rights and an end to discriminatory laws. In this city in the eastern province of Punjab, 5,000 women rallied -- among them, Mukhtaran Mai, a woman who was gang-raped in 2002 on orders of a tribal council in a village near Multan, as punishment for her brother's alleged affair with a woman from a higher-caste family.

About 2,000 men marched in Bangladesh's capital ahead of today's observance of International Women's Day to protest acid attacks that permanently disfigure many women each year, organizers said. The protesters carried placards and banners reading "Stop acid violence, respect women's rights" and "Throwing acid is a heinous crime." Most of the victims are attacked by spurned lovers.